508 research outputs found
A Tale of Two Fractals: The Hofstadter Butterfly and The Integral Apollonian Gaskets
This paper unveils a mapping between a quantum fractal that describes a
physical phenomena, and an abstract geometrical fractal. The quantum fractal is
the Hofstadter butterfly discovered in 1976 in an iconic condensed matter
problem of electrons moving in a two-dimensional lattice in a transverse
magnetic field. The geometric fractal is the integer Apollonian gasket
characterized in terms of a 300 BC problem of mutually tangent circles. Both of
these fractals are made up of integers. In the Hofstadter butterfly, these
integers encode the topological quantum numbers of quantum Hall conductivity.
In the Apollonian gaskets an infinite number of mutually tangent circles are
nested inside each other, where each circle has integer curvature. The mapping
between these two fractals reveals a hidden threefold symmetry embedded in the
kaleidoscopic images that describe the asymptotic scaling properties of the
butterfly. This paper also serves as a mini review of these fractals,
emphasizing their hierarchical aspects in terms of Farey fractions
Coherence in scale-free networks of chaotic maps
We study fully synchronized states in scale-free networks of chaotic logistic
maps as a function of both dynamical and topological parameters. Three
different network topologies are considered: (i) random scale-free topology,
(ii) deterministic pseudo-fractal scale-free network, and (iii) Apollonian
network. For the random scale-free topology we find a coupling strength
threshold beyond which full synchronization is attained. This threshold scales
as , where is the outgoing connectivity and depends on the
local nonlinearity. For deterministic scale-free networks coherence is observed
only when the coupling strength is proportional to the neighbor connectivity.
We show that the transition to coherence is of first-order and study the role
of the most connected nodes in the collective dynamics of oscillators in
scale-free networks.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure
Apollonian structure in the Abelian sandpile
The Abelian sandpile process evolves configurations of chips on the integer
lattice by toppling any vertex with at least 4 chips, distributing one of its
chips to each of its 4 neighbors. When begun from a large stack of chips, the
terminal state of the sandpile has a curious fractal structure which has
remained unexplained. Using a characterization of the quadratic growths
attainable by integer-superharmonic functions, we prove that the sandpile PDE
recently shown to characterize the scaling limit of the sandpile admits certain
fractal solutions, giving a precise mathematical perspective on the fractal
nature of the sandpile.Comment: 27 Pages, 7 Figure
Spectral Action Models of Gravity on Packed Swiss Cheese Cosmology
We present a model of (modified) gravity on spacetimes with fractal structure
based on packing of spheres, which are (Euclidean) variants of the Packed Swiss
Cheese Cosmology models. As the action functional for gravity we consider the
spectral action of noncommutative geometry, and we compute its expansion on a
space obtained as an Apollonian packing of 3-dimensional spheres inside a
4-dimensional ball. Using information from the zeta function of the Dirac
operator of the spectral triple, we compute the leading terms in the asymptotic
expansion of the spectral action. They consist of a zeta regularization of a
divergent sum which involves the leading terms of the spectral actions of the
individual spheres in the packing. This accounts for the contribution of the
points 1 and 3 in the dimension spectrum (as in the case of a 3-sphere). There
is an additional term coming from the residue at the additional point in the
real dimension spectrum that corresponds to the packing constant, as well as a
series of fluctuations coming from log-periodic oscillations, created by the
points of the dimension spectrum that are off the real line. These terms detect
the fractality of the residue set of the sphere packing. We show that the
presence of fractality influences the shape of the slow-roll potential for
inflation, obtained from the spectral action. We also discuss the effect of
truncating the fractal structure at a certain scale related to the energy scale
in the spectral action.Comment: 38 pages LaTe
Polydisperse Adsorption: Pattern Formation Kinetics, Fractal Properties, and Transition to Order
We investigate the process of random sequential adsorption of polydisperse
particles whose size distribution exhibits a power-law dependence in the small
size limit, . We reveal a relation between pattern
formation kinetics and structural properties of arising patterns. We propose a
mean-field theory which provides a fair description for sufficiently small
. When , highly ordered structures locally identical
to the Apollonian packing are formed. We introduce a quantitative criterion of
the regularity of the pattern formation process. When , a sharp
transition from irregular to regular pattern formation regime is found to occur
near the jamming coverage of standard random sequential adsorption with
monodisperse size distribution.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, 5 figures, to appear in Phys.Rev.
Self-similar disk packings as model spatial scale-free networks
The network of contacts in space-filling disk packings, such as the
Apollonian packing, are examined. These networks provide an interesting example
of spatial scale-free networks, where the topology reflects the broad
distribution of disk areas. A wide variety of topological and spatial
properties of these systems are characterized. Their potential as models for
networks of connected minima on energy landscapes is discussed.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures; some bugs fixed and further discussion of
higher-dimensional packing
Cohomology fractals
We introduce cohomology fractals; these are certain images associated to a
cohomology class on a hyperbolic three-manifold. They include images made
entirely from circles, and also images with no geometrically simple features.
They are closely related to limit sets of kleinian groups, but have some key
differences. As a consequence, we can zoom in almost any direction to arbitrary
depth in real time. We present an implementation in the setting of ideal
triangulations using ray-casting.Comment: 8 pages, 30 figures and subfigure
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